Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD
Eastwood’s Brawn and Einstein’s Brain: An Evolutionary
Account of Dominance, Prestige, and Precarious Manhood
Bo Winegard*
Florida State University
Ben Winegard* and David C. Geary
University of Missouri
* Both authors contributed equally to the manuscript
1
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD
Abstract
Researchers have theorized that manhood is a precarious social status that requires effort
to achieve. Because of this, men whose manhood is threatened react with a variety of
compensatory behaviors and cognitions such as aggression, support for hierarchy, low
tolerance for homosexuality, and support for war. In the following article, we argue that
the precarious status of manhood is a result of evolutionary propensities and cultural
forces. Specifically, men evolved in dominance hierarchies and therefore display honest
signals of strength and vigor to dissuade other men from fighting them. But men also
evolved in large, prestige-based coalitions and compete against each other to display
traits that enhance a coalition. These traits can vary from physical prowess and
aggression to intelligence and empathy. As culture becomes more pluralistic and
modernized, traditional notions of manhood become less important and alternative
avenues for achieving status become available.
2
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD
3
A tale of two National Football League (NFL) quarterbacks: Jay Cutler and Philip
Rivers. Both were regarded as talented NFL players, and both were known for being
brash, prickly, perhaps arrogant. Both led their teams into the playoffs. There, they
experienced reputation-defining moments. Rivers was hailed as a hero; Cutler was
decried as a coward. Rivers experienced his moment in the 2008 playoffs. Just six days
before the AFC championship game, he tore his anterior cruciate ligament, a devastating
injury. Against the advice of doctors, Rivers demanded to play, compelling his coach
Norv Turner to praise his “mental toughness,” and “indomitable will.” (Crouse, 2009).
His performance earned him the number eight “all time gutsiest performances” from NFL
films (http://www.nfl.com/videos/nfl-network-top-ten/09000d5d810a58f8/Top-TenGutsiest-Performances-Philip-Rivers). Cutler experienced his moment in the 2011
playoffs. During the second quarter of the NFC championship game, Cutler injured his
knee. At the half, Cutler, the team, and the doctor agreed that he should test the knee in
the third quarter. After an ineffectual performance, Cutler said his knee didn’t feel right,
and the team pulled him. Analysts and current players immediately assailed Cutler’s
character, questioning his toughness and his dedication to his team. A disgruntled fan
even created a Facebook page called “Jay Cutler is a pussy.” The group description reads,
“Jay Cutler just flat out sucks. She is a pussy bitch, who pulled herself out of the NFC
championship game. [emphases added]” (Levin, 2011).
Professional sports culture may adhere to a particularly virulent form of
machismo (Kreager, 2007; Messner, 1990), but attacks on men’s masculinity are not
isolated to these subcultures (Funk & Werhun, 2011; Kimmel, 1987; 2012). Researchers
have argued that manhood is a status that must be constantly earned, and that it depends
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD
4
more on action and behavior than on genetics or genitals (Vandello & Bosson, 2012).
According to precarious manhood theory, manhood is a precarious identity that can be
sullied by the insults (such as “pussy” or “bitch”) of social peers and rivals. Men often
respond to such insults (or threats) by reasserting their manhood through aggression,
competition, and hierarchy-supporting behaviors and attitudes (Bosson, Vandello,
Burnaford, Weaver, J. R., & Wasti, 2009; Willer, Rogalin, Conlon, & Wojnowicz, 2013).
These theorists have noted that this precariousness may be a result of evolution,
socialization, or a combination of both (see for example, Bosson & Vandello, 2011;
Vandello & Bosson, 2012). However, they have not, to date, provided a compelling
explanation of the theory or of the fascinating results they have discovered in a number of
clever and well-designed experiments.
In the following, we present an evolutionary account of manhood, focusing
specifically on precarious manhood, that explains the nature of male social interaction
and the importance of manhood for regulating male behavior. Although cruel, unfair, and
perhaps anachronistic, the attacks on Jay Cutler and the praise for Philip Rivers are a
functional component of the male social world, serving as punishment against men who
are perceived as failing a coalition and rewards for men who are perceived as enhancing a
coalition, especially when this requires self-sacrifice. We argue that such social feedback
serves two primary functions: 1) it creates a reputation that signals to potential rivals and
allies about the quality of a man’s underlying traits that are of cultural importance,
including commitments to the in-group, and 2) it motivates and at times manipulates
men’s investment in coalitional behavior.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD
5
First, we briefly overview the theory of precarious manhood, followed by a
discussion of men’s achievement of social status through dominance and prestige. Then,
we cover the basics of the evolution of male dominance behavior, noting connections
between humans and other primates (and mammals). This, we argue, explains the first
function of the status of manhood: it conveys information about a man’s social
dominance, allowing men to assess each other and often to avoid costly and mutually
injurious physical confrontations. In this sense, the status of manhood is a mechanism
that regulates dominance contests in humans that are common to many other mammalian
(as well as non-mammalian) species. Such contests determine access to vital resources,
including reproductively viable females. Men differ from these nonhuman animals
because they can also achieve status by possessing culturally and socially important skills
(prestige), in addition to or instead of traits needed to achieve and maintain physical
dominance.
Men also differ from nearly all nonhuman animals because they acquire status in
the context of intergroup competition. That is, men strive to achieve status by displaying
social dominance while also conveying traits that make them valuable coalitional partners
to other men. This explains the second function of the status of manhood: it regulates
group behavior and it signals a man’s value to a potential and/or current coalition. Before
concluding, we briefly speculate that although womanhood is not precarious, female
sexuality might be. That is, women are expected to sustain a reputation of sexual
modesty, a reputation that can be easily besmirched and lost.
Precarious Manhood
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD
6
Across cultures, the status of manhood is a critical indicator of a man’s social
value (Brown, 1991; Gilmore, 1990; Heald, 2002; Herdt, 1982). Researchers have argued
that manhood is a precarious status, one that is arduous to obtain and easy to lose. This
for three basic reasons. First, manhood is a social status that must be earned or
achieved. That is, manhood, unlike womanhood, is not a biologically based designation;
women have reproductive value by virtue of biology, but men’s reproductive value is
cheap and easily replaced. Second, it can be lost once achieved. Because manhood is
socially conferred, it can be lost if others refuse to confer it. And third, it requires public
demonstration. Again, because manhood is socially conferred, the man who strives to
obtain it must convince others through his behaviors and displays that he has earned it
(Vandello & Bosson, 2012). In most known cultures, boys and adolescents are required to
endure painful rituals, learn sacred, secret knowledge, and emit the appropriate public
displays before earning manhood (Flannery & Marcus, 2012). Researchers contend that
these features of manhood contribute to a suite of stereotypically male attitudes and
behaviors such as aggression, competition, risk taking, and hierarchy endorsement
(Bosson & Vandello, 2011; Willer, Rogalin, Conlon, & Wojnowicz, 2013).
A man’s status as a man requires constant vigilance and public affirmation
because it is only through the esteem or fear of other men that a man can obtain and
sustain such status. Because of this, researchers hypothesized that manhood threats
should instigate a series of compensatory behaviors and cognitions, designed either to
reassert manhood publically or assuage manhood-based anxieties. Research supports this
hypothesis. For example, Bosson et al. (2009) threatened manhood by having one group
of men braid a mannequin's hair (a stereotypically feminine behavior) while the other
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD
7
group braided rope. After, the men in the mannequin condition chose punching a bag
over solving a puzzle task more often than the men in the rope braiding condition. In
another study, Willer et al. (2013) threatened manhood by supplying bogus feedback on a
gender-identity survey. One group of men was told that they were in the middle of the
masculine distribution; the other, that they were just inside the feminine range. Men
whose gender identity was threatened (i.e., who were told that they had a feminine
gender-identity) reported more negative views of homosexuality, greater support for the
Iraq war, and a stronger desire to purchase an SUV than men whose gender identity was
not threatened. Other studies have found similar results, showing that men in a genderthreat condition are more likely to endorse and behave in stereotypically masculine ways
than non-threatened men (Funk & Werhun, 2011; Glick, Gangl, Gibb, Klumpner, &
Weinberg, 2007; Weaver, Vandello, & Bosson, 2013).
Researchers in the precarious manhood tradition have contended that evolution
may be an important cause of the precariousness of manhood; however, they have not
forwarded a comprehensive account of the evolutionary function of the status of
manhood (see for example, Bosson & Vandello, 2011). We agree that a full account of
manhood requires a careful analysis of the evolutionary pressures that led to men’s
status-related psychological and behavioral propensities; furthermore, this analysis is
important for practical recommendations related to men’s behavior (i.e., ameliorating
possible social ills associated with precarious manhood). It is important to note that an
evolutionary account of this phenomenon does not rule out cultural or sociological
analyses of it (Confer et al., 2010; Lehman, Chiu, & Schaller, 2004), and because status
can be obtained by displaying culturally valued traits, the route to manhood may vary
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD
8
from culture to culture. Evolution may have created an implicit concern for status, but the
way this status is achieved is shaped and guided by cultural forces, as we will note
toward the end of this article (Eastwick, 2009; Zentner & Mitura, 2012). Before
addressing the evolution of men’s motivation to obtain status, however, we must
articulate a distinction between dominance and prestige processes.
Status
Henrich and Gil-White (2001) proposed that there are two routes to status:
dominance and prestige. Status is defined as the degree to which an individual attracts the
attention of others, possesses influence, and is deferred to without overt challenge. High
status individuals have priority access to coveted social goods such as food, material
resources, and mates (Cheng, Tracy, Foulsham, Klingstone, & Henrich, 2013).
Dominance is conceptualized as a relation where subordinance is maintained by fear of
coercion or physical violence in agonistic encounters (Mazur, 2005; Rowell, 1974).
Prestige is conceptualized as a relation where subordination is maintained by the
voluntary consent of the subordinate because he or she esteems the traits of the
prestigious individual (Barkow, 1974; Cheng et al., 2013; Henrich & Gil-White, 2001).
For example, if people submitted to the leadership of Joseph Stalin because they (rightly)
feared his retribution, we would call his status dominance based; dominance is in fact a
core element of social and political power in despotic regimes (Betzig, 1986). Upon the
other hand, if people freely submitted to his leadership because they admired his ability
to organize social institutions in ways that benefited them and thus desired to follow his
orders, we would call his status prestige based. In human relations, dominance and
prestige are often indistinguishably intermingled. Julius Caesar, to take one example,
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD
9
inspired love and fear, sometimes in the same mind, and it is difficult to say how much of
his influence was due to his power or ability to punish subordinates and how much was
due to his charm, rhetorical gifts, and/or military accomplishments (Goldsworthy, 2008).
We will argue that dominance is the primary and often the only mechanism
through which individuals obtain status in most mammalian species and in most early
human societies and civilizations (Geary, 2010). (In many extant hunter-gatherer
societies, dominant individuals are often restrained by group norms and status disparities,
although evident, are not large; see, Boehm, 1999). Prestige processes, upon the other
hand, can more fully operate in well-integrated and regulated groups in which skills such
as intelligence and creativity can provide benefits to other members of the group.
Because such skills benefit other members of the group, those members willingly defer to
men who possess them and are willing to use them to benefit others. In principle, the
conferred prestige should be proportionate to the scarcity and group-enhancing potential
of the skills. Men who possess scarce traits that benefit a group, for example, should reap
substantial rewards. As societies grow and become economically specialized, more
avenues to prestige open. Without centralized police forces, widely shared political
power, and regulated intergroup rivalries, however, dominance often remains an
important component of a society’s status system. Most of the first large-scale
civilizations, for example, were dominance based. In ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Aztec
(Mexico), Inca (Peru), imperial India, and imperial China, “powerful men mate with
hundreds of women, pass their power on to a son by one legitimate wife, and take the
lives of men who get in their way” (Betzig, 1993, p. 37). Of course, there were prestige-
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 10
related ways to achieve status in these societies, but the most successful (reproductively)
men appear to have achieved status primarily through dominance (Betzig, 2012).
The emergence of representative governments, centralized police forces, the
suppression of polygyny and dominance-related social disputes, and the emergence of
modern market-based economies resulted in a shift from dominance-based forms of male
organization to prestige-based social orders (Pinker, 2012). Dominance-based conflicts
still occur in such societies, but they are often discouraged and punished. In these
contexts, prestige plays an important role in group-based human dynamics, allowing for
the creation of extensive networks and hierarchies of freely consenting individuals. Both
processes play an important role in manhood narratives as well as contributing to the
elusiveness of manhood.
Evolution of Dominance and manhood
As detailed by Darwin more than 140 years ago (1871), males compete against
each other (intrasexual competition) for access to mates or to control resources required
by females to reproduce (e.g., nesting sites). Females compete with each other as well;
however, female intrasexual competition is generally less intense than male intrasexual
competition and is spurred by scarce resources such as food and territory more than by
potential mates (Clutton-Brock, 2009; Tobias et al., 2012). Trivers (1972) provided the
generally accepted explanation for this sex difference in competition over mates, which,
with some qualifications, remains the standard explanation (Kokko & Jennions, 2003;
Queller, 1997). Specifically, according to Trivers, the different levels of parental
investment between the sexes--driven in part by the biology of reproduction (e.g., internal
gestation in mammals)--results in different cost-benefit tradeoffs for the sexes. Because
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 11
female mammals develop offspring internally, requiring somewhere between 13-626 days
(depending on the species) to produce viable progeny (Harder, Stonerook, & Pondy,
1993; Kiltie, 1982), and because they cannot get pregnant for this 13 to 626 day duration,
there are generally more males than females in the mating market at any one time
(Clutton-Brock & Vincent, 1991). Furthermore, males can potentially sire a large number
of offspring by accessing multiple reproductively viable females, whereas females cannot
(because they are limited by the length of pregnancy). Stated economically, females are
the “limiting resource” in the mating market, compelling men to compete intensively for
access to or control over them.
In species where females congregate (e.g., due to food access, nesting sites),
males compete intensively for reproductive access and often form some kind of male
hierarchy (Emlen & Oring, 1977). Those males who obtain the top positions in such
hierarchies sire the vast majority of offspring and thwart subordinates’ reproductive
efforts. The resulting competition to ascend the hierarchy is typically violent and often
deadly (de Waal, 1982; Ellis, 1995; Girman, Mills, Geffen, & Wayne, 1997; Sapolsky,
2004; Wroblewski et al., 2009). Despite incessantly jostling for a few prized positions at
the top of the hierarchy, male interactions are not uniformly aggressive. After the creation
of a relatively stable dominance hierarchy, subordinate males often remain quiescent or
withdraw from potential conflicts with dominant males, reducing the potential costs of
escalating physical battles (Lorenz, 1966). Such submission may be signaled by
retreating from the territory of the dominant male or through ritualized displays in social
species that dwell in groups. Wolves, for example, emit several submissive signals that
attenuate aggression from dominant animals (Schenkel, 1967). Signals of submission are
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 12
also emitted by many primate species including chimpanzees (e.g., bowing, pant
grunting), rhesus macaques (baring teeth), and baboons (grinning, grooming) (de Waal,
1982; de Waal & Luttrell, 1985; Rowell, 1966).
To avoid the costs of unnecessary physical conflict, males often engage in a
ritualized assessment of each other’s strength and fighting ability, forgoing fights that
would result in definite defeat (Maynard Smith & Price, 1973). The benefits of pre-fight
assessments created a pressure to evolve and display signals of strength, size, and vigor.
In many species, physical competition has led to the evolution of elaborate weapons such
as horns, spikes, pinchers, and claws, which also serve as hard-to-fake signals of the
possessor’s underlying health and vigor (Emlen, 2008). By hard-to-fake signal, we mean
a signal that is reliably related to the underlying quality that it signals (Cronk, 2005). For
example, Scottish red deer stags often roar when protecting their harems, warning other
stags against encroachment. The frequency of the roar is a hard-to-fake signal of the size
and age of the stag because the frequency is constrained by the phenotype of the deer
(Reby & McComb, 2003); smaller stags are simply incapable of emitting the frequencies
that larger stags emit. Dominance hierarchies, therefore, are often enforced and
maintained through signals and assessments rather than constant and costly confrontation.
Humans are, in many ways, no different from other social animals that form
dominance hierarchies. Men compete more intensively than women for access to
reproductively viable mates and form hierarchies of dominance and prestige (we will
address prestige in a later section) (Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Geary, 2010; Puts, 2010;
Schmitt, Shackelford, & Buss, 2001); Women compete as well and form dominance
hierarchies, but these often are not so large and complicated (e.g., featuring role
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 13
differentiation) as men’s hierarchies. Furthermore, women generally enforce positions in
hierarchies by disrupting the social networks of competitors, not by engaging in physical
conflict (Geary, Winegard, & Winegard, 2014). Once established, male hierarchies are
endured by subordinates and aggressions abates, although a constant stream of low-level
harassment often remains (Salvador, 2005). Competition between men is often a kind of
cold war of signaling and displays without direct aggression. One crucial difference
between humans and nonhuman animals is that humans can communicate and store
information effectively through symbolic cognition and language (Chomsky, 2000;
Pinker, 1994), which allows for more abstract signaling, including the development of
reputations.
Reputations are important sources of information that men parlay to make
effective decisions about their own behavior toward other men, especially men with
whom they have had little direct experience. (Holland, 2004; Krasnow, Cosmides,
Pederson, & Tooby, 2012). If Jim is known as a formidable physical foe with a short fuse
and a propensity for violence, it might pay to leave him alone. On the other hand, if Jim
is known as a maladroit coward who shies away from violence, it might be worth a pass
at his wife or his large supply of bread. Men, therefore, are often compelled to develop
aggressive and vindictive reputations, especially in environments without centralized,
regulated channels (e.g., police, government) for protecting important resources and
settling disputes (Barnes, Brown, & Tamborski, 2012; Cohen & Nisbett, 1994; Pinker,
2012).
Reputations and other signals of a man’s ability to fight or compete in a hierarchy
must be reasonably honest to affect the behaviors of others. That is, as with other
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 14
animals’ signals (see above), men’s displays must be hard to fake. Indeed, evidence
supports the prediction that men’s physical traits are hard-to-fake signals of dominance
(Mueller & Mazur, 1996; 1997). Furthermore, evidence also indicates that men use such
signals and cues (e.g., voice, jaw structure, muscularity) to assess each other, deferring to
dominant men and standing erect to subordinate men (Puts, 2010; Sell et al., 2009; Sell et
al., 2010). Men’s reputations and social displays appear to follow a similar pattern; that
is, they appear to be hard-to-fake signals of a man’s underlying tendencies and traits. We
believe that many of the displays and behaviors that the precarious manhood theorists
address are used as hard-to-fake signals to other men (a suggestion that has been
forwarded in the literature on precarious manhood, see Vandello & Bosson, 2012).
Derogation of another man might also be a kind of ritualistic confrontation to see how the
derogated man responds to a challenge (Eder, 1995; Kalish & Kimmel, 2010; Klein,
2012).
Manhood is a precarious status, from this perspective, because it must be difficult
to achieve and maintain–there will always be men looking to increase their status at the
expense of other men–if it is to remain reliably related to the traits it signals. Many
manhood-related rituals, for example, involve extremely painful procedures that are
designed to display a man’s tolerance for pain (Gilmore, 1990). These tolerance displays
extend into adolescence and even adult life and may explain the popularity of television
shows such as Jackass and Scarred that show men engaging in risky behavior and
suffering the often painful consequences, with success and endurance of pain resulting in
an increase in status among their peers (Geary, 2010). (It is also worth noting that many
male silent film comedians--Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd, for
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 15
example --often engaged in similarly risky behaviors, albeit in a more cerebral fashion
than the actors of Jackass.) The status of manhood also often requires others to believe
that one is willing and capable of defending resources, romantic partners, and reputation
through physical confrontation (Liddle, Shackelford, & Weekes-Shackelford, 2012;
Shackelford, 2005). Men who are physically weak, trepidatious, or otherwise unwilling to
defend their resources and reputations actually suffer serious status decrements in the
dominance hierarchy, losing preferential access to crucial resources (Adler, Less, &
Adler, 1992; de Bruyn, Cillessen, & Weisfeld, 2012; Coleman, 1961; Gat, 2000; Kolbert
& Crothers, 2003; Milner jr, 2006 ). The threats used by the precarious manhood
researchers are similar to real social challenges to a man’s reputation, and therefore
receive responses designed to restore the threatened man’s reputation.
So far we have focused on male intrasexual competition and its relation to
precarious manhood. Although we have emphasized the ultimate (i.e., evolutionary)
function of the status of manhood, our analysis has been mostly consistent with analyses
forwarded by precarious manhood researchers (e.g., Vandello & Bosson, 2012). In the
next section, we will focus on intergroup competition and the role of the status of
manhood in regulating ingroup behavior, cooperation, prestige, and conflict. To our
knowledge, the precarious manhood researchers have not emphasized this function of the
status of manhood.
Ecological Dominance, Coalitions, and Prestige
Humans are a uniquely cooperative primate. Unlike other primates, humans form
extensive multilevel networks with kin and nonkin alike. (Chapais, 2010; Hill et al.,
2011). They use speech to coordinate group activities, divide into specialized roles, and
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 16
engage in protracted and organized raiding against competing coalitions (Bird, 1999;
Leblanc & Register, 2003; Pinker, 2012), among many other differences (Geary, 2005;
Penn, Holyoak, & Povinelli, 2008). Among these differences is humans’ willingness to
defer to or confer prestige upon other humans who possess important skills that enhance
the productivity and/or formidability of the group, as mentioned earlier (Henrich & GilWhite, 2001). These unique capacities likely allowed a relatively small and unassuming
African primate to spread into multiple continents and cope with a variety of
environmental conditions, from the bleak winters of the north to the sun blasted deserts of
the equator (Oppenheimer, 2012). Researchers have forwarded myriad theories to explain
the evolution of the nexus of novel traits that facilitated humans’ conquest of the globe.
Although many of these are not directly testable, they can be assessed for general
plausibility and parsimony (e.g., Bailey & Geary, 2009). We believe that Alexander’s
(1990) ecological dominance and social competition theory (EDSC) remains the most
compelling and persuasive (see also, Flinn, Geary, & Ward, 2005; Geary, 2005).
According to EDSC, at some point in hominid evolution--perhaps with Homo
ergaster/erectus--humans achieved an unprecedented level of control over the
environment. That is, advances in hominid emotional, cognitive, and physical abilities
allowed them increasingly to control crucial resources (e.g., through hunting) and reduce
predation risks, resulting in reduced mortality and population expansion. This
combination of ecological dominance and increased population sizes shifted selective
pressures primarily from extra-species hostile forces (e.g., predation, starvation) to the
competing demands of other people. In Alexander’s (1990) words, humans became their
own “hostile forces of nature.” (p.4). The resulting within-species arms race may have
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 17
been the critical pressure for the evolutionary expansion of the human brain and the
emergence of many unique cognitive abilities (Geary, 2005). An increasing capacity to
cooperate and form collaborative coalitions may have been an important consequence of
augmented competition among humans. And, because a coalition’s competitive ability
increases as its number of members increases, this created an escalating pressure to form
more complicated and expansive coalitions. In other species in which males cooperate
during male-male competition, there is a strong relation between group size and
competitive ability (Wrangham, 1999). This relation results in advantages for any
mechanism (e.g., ideologies that facilitate cooperation against out groups) that enables
the formation of larger groups, as well as mechanisms that result in the vetting of wouldbe coalitionary partners (Cimino, 2013).
Strong evidence suggests that men were and remain the chief players in these
coalitional conflicts and therefore faced different selection pressures from women
(Geary, 2010). Primarily, men had to cooperate in larger, more hierarchical groups than
did women because hierarchies facilitate within-group cooperation and between-group
competitive ability. These male groups participated in cooperative hunting (a component
of ecological dominance) and engaged in between-group raiding and warfare that
influenced the reproductive prospects of the entire community (Bowles, 2009; Keegan,
1994). This cooperation required a greater tolerance of same-sex individuals and
inequality (Benenson, et al., 2009), a development of narratives or moral systems that
emphasized the value of the coalition, and a mechanism to reward cooperation with
distant kin and non-relatives (Johnson, 2005; Norenzayan & Sharriff, 2008). From an
individual’s perspective, cooperation is potentially costly because other individuals might
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 18
accumulate benefits without reciprocating and therefore can only evolve if it is
proportionally recompensed (Trivers, 1971). A “status-exchange” model (Anderson &
Kennedy, 2012; Henrich & Gil-White, 2001; Winegard, 2011) of sociality addresses this
potential risk by positing that individuals who perform a behavior that benefits a group
receive payment in the currency of deference and prestige (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009).
For example, if Paul risks his life in battle to protect his coalition from a competing
coalition, men in Paul’s group will defer to him, praise him, and allow him access to
favored resources and mates. In this way, both Paul and other members of the group
benefit; Paul through increased access to resources, the other group members through
survival and the continued success of their group. Of course, this is not always true and
there are other, more dominance-based methods of ensuring group obedience, but
physical coercion is often an unstable coalitional strategy that can be thwarted through
the cooperation of others in the group (Boehm, 2012). The important point is that men
possess a bias for according status to other men (and women) who benefit the coalition
(chimpanzees may have a proto-status-exchange system where a male exchanges political
support for access to matings, see Duffy, Wrangham, & Silk, 2007). This system is
further buttressed by the propagation of narratives that highlight the value of selfsacrifice and group loyalty, common themes found in most moral systems and narratives
propounded by group leaders (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Costa & Kahn, 2003;
Durkheim,1997). These narratives function to augment cooperation and group size,
creating a more cohesive and effective coalition.
The status of manhood is often accorded to men for displays of physical prowess
or courage (Nye, 2007; Vandello & Bosson, 2012). This pattern is understandable if part
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 19
of the function of manhood is to accord prestige to men who benefit a coalition,
especially a coalition that often engages in violent conflict with another coalition.
Strength, skill, courage, and tolerance for pain are all traits that enhance a coalition’s
chances for success in a violent conflict (Hanson; 2013; Keegan, 1994). Although there
are clear benefits to large coalitions, there are also costs. Specifically, the collective gains
and rewards of the coalition must be more widely diffused; concomitantly, the
temptations of freeloading on the accomplishments of other increases. Because of these
potential costs, individuals within successful coalitions should vet and monitor each other
and should strive to demonstrate hard-to-fake signals of their commitment and functional
importance to a coalition. Initiation rituals represent the extreme end of the vetting
process, forcing members to engage in costly, painful, and often protracted ordeals (Sosis
& Alcorta, 2003) In many street gangs, for example, initiates are violently beaten by
multiple members of the gang and are chastised for displaying expressions of fear or pain
(Vigil, 1996). Stripping a man of his status of manhood by insulting him or slurring him
is a quick and efficient way of broadcasting his low value to a coalition. This may either
provoke him to contribute more to the group or, if possible, to leave the group. (In
extreme circumstances, he may be forcibly exiled from the group or even murdered). For
example, if a man flees a battle, others might call him a “pussy” or a “coward,” making
an example of him by attacking his status while simultaneously informing other group
members that he might be a poor coalition partner. To repair his ruined image, the man
who fled might engage in hard-to-fake public behaviors that indicate that he is not
feckless, such as fighting, displaying physical vigor, or assaulting other men.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 20
Consider the introductory example of Philip Rivers and Jay Cutler. Rivers was
lauded for defying the recommendations of physicians. Eschewing concerns about wellbeing, he played in an important game (to his coalition and their fans) while injured. The
praise he received accomplished at least three things, 1) it increased his public status for
possessing a team-first attitude (gave him prestige); 2) it made such behavior more
appealing to other men by publicly rewarding it; and, 3) it earned him the respect of his
teammates and therefore increased his “locker room” influence. Cutler, on the other hand,
was pulled from an important game because of an injury. Furthermore, Cutler’s injury
was not dramatic nor easily perceivable, and he seemed relatively disengaged from the
game. The savage insults (“pussy” “whiner”) and accusations (he “gave up” and could
not “gut it out for the team”) he received served similar, but inverse, functions to the
praise that Rivers received. Instead of exalting his status, they deflated it. Furthermore,
the social costs imposed on Cutler likely reduced the odds of others withdrawing from an
important game (or from valuing personal health over the productivity of the coalition).
[INSERT TABLE 1. ABOUT HERE]
Précis of the Evolutionary Account of Precarious Manhood
The following provides a précis of our evolutionary account of precarious manhood.
Throughout mammalian evolution, males have competed more intensively than females
for important resources including mates. Because of differences in parental investment
(Trivers, 1972), males have often been compelled to compete intensively against each
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 21
other for access to resources. This pattern is found in 95 to 97% of mammalian species,
including humans (Geary, 2010).
In social mammals, male-on-male competition leads to the development of dominance
hierarchies. In many mammalian species, males regularly interact and inhabit the same
territory. In such species, the males (and often the females) form dominance hierarchies
in which rank is determined by size, strength, age, health, and vigor (Cafazzo, Valsecchi,
Bonanni, & Natoli, 2010; Meese & Ewbank, 1973; Muller & Mitani, 2005).
Position in dominance hierarchies does not require constant physical confrontation.
Rather, position is often determined through the “voluntary subordination” of males to
more robust or physically imposing males. Physical battle is potentially costly, leading to
injury or death. Therefore, in many species, males voluntarily submit to the dominance of
more vigorous, older, and more formidable males (Alcock, 2013). This creates a
hierarchy of dominance and submission that does not require constant physical conflict to
maintain (Maynard Smith & Harper, 2003).
A dominance hierarchy based on perceptions of health, strength, vigor, et cetera creates
pressures for the development of hard-to-fake signals that broadcast such traits. The
traits that facilitate successful fighting are not always easy to perceive or obvious to other
animals. For example, a male’s health may not be easily perceivable. However, the male
can signal his health through other, more perspicuous and often costly traits such as
colorful facial patterns, large antlers, or gaudy feathers (Maynard Smith & Harper, 2003;
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 22
Searcy & Nowicki, 2010). If the signal is reliably related to the underlying traits it
advertises, other males will use it to gauge the male’s dominance.
Men inhabit social hierarchies based partially on dominance and therefore emit hard-tofake signals of dominance. Men’s psychological propensities evolved in the context of
dominance hierarchies (Dubreuil, 2013; Geary, 2010; Puts, 2010). Men have a long
history of battling over crucial resources, including other mates (Buss, 2009). This led to
the development of hard-to-fake signals of dominance (Dixson & Vasey, 2012; Pound,
Penton-Voak, & Surridge, 2009; Puts, Hodges, Cardenas, & Gaulin, 2007). Because
humans also inhabit a more abstract signaling world than other nonhuman animals, these
signals can take a more abstract--i.e., verbal--form. For example, a man’s reputation is, to
some degree, a hard-to-fake signal of his dominance (Wyatt-Brown, 2007).
This leads to precarious manhood because manhood displays and reputations are signals
of a man’s dominance. Men protect these vigorously because they partially determine
rank in a hierarchy; therefore, they determine a man’s access to valued resources.
Manhood is a precious status for men to achieve because it signals dominance to other
men. However, because this status is conferred by social observers, it can be lost if others
refuse to confer it (Gilmore, 1990; Pleck, 1983). This compels men to remain vigilant
about their manhood and to respond rapidly to manhood threats by displaying signals of
dominance that are designed to repair challenged reputations (Bosson & Vandello, 2011).
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 23
Humans also evolved a status-exchange system of group affiliation and coordination.
Humans are uniquely cooperative animals who form extensive, multi-level networks of
associations. Such cooperation requires a novel system of rewards and punishments.
Prestige, or freely conferred deference based on esteem, serves the function of rewarding
prosocial skills and behaviors (Anderson & Kennedy, 2012; Henrich & Gil-White, 2001;
Winegard, 2011).
Prestige is granted to those men who benefit a coalition and withheld from those who do
not enhance or even injure a coalition. In this way, prestige is functional (i.e., it promotes
effective, productive coalitions). Because men often competed against other male
coalitions, sometimes in fierce physical battle, traits such as physical prowess, intrepidity,
and self-sacrifice were valued and improved the capacity of a coalition to compete
effectively with another coalition (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009; Baumeister, 2010; Geary,
2010). Prestige is offered to men who possess these traits because such traits benefit other
members of the coalition (Cheng et al., 2013). Conversely, prestige is withheld from men
who do not possess such traits. Furthermore, men who actively harm a coalition are
denigrated and forced to suffer the indignities of low social status.
Precarious Manhood and Culture
In the previous sections, we framed an evolutionarily informed model of
precarious manhood. However, humans evolved for and with culture (Baumeister, 2005).
By culture, we mean the organized system of rules, norms, and mores for social behavior
that are promoted and enforced by social leaders and institutions (e.g., legally enforced
monogamy; suppression of male-male aggression; market-based economic policies). As
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 24
noted earlier, the division of labor, complex economies, centralized governments, and
suppression of violence in modern societies have created multiple niches not available in
traditional societies. These niches allow sundry paths to status and social prestige. For
example, a man in Western industrial societies can achieve status by playing a guitar,
acting in a film, learning abstruse facts about history, or, perhaps regrettably, by
appearing on a reality television program. These opportunities, along with the legal
suppression of male dominance-related aggression, have resulted in a secular decline in
the emphasis on behaviors traditionally associated with manhood (e.g., risk taking,
violence, vengeance, war). Of course, some subcultures within modern societies
emphasize the more traditional forms of masculine behavior, while others disparage those
same behaviors (e.g., as in some goth subcultures or artistically oriented subcultures, see
Brill, 2008; Hodkinson, 2002). That both a meek, unassuming man such as Bill Gates and
a large, burly man such as Arnold Schwarzenegger could achieve status in the same
society is evidence of this cultural pluralism; concomitantly, it also evidence that
dominance (or at least dominance displays as in Schwarzenegger’s films) is not the only
way to successfully climb a modern hierarchy1.
Men’s reputations for vindictiveness and physical prowess are more important in
societies that lack centralized law enforcement than in those that possess strong
centralized legal structures (Cohen & Nisbett, 1994; Hobbes, 1651/1982; Pinker, 2012).
As we argued above, this is because reputations serve important roles in preventing other
men from encroaching upon valued resources. Without a centralized law enforcement
agency, a violent reputation might be the only thing a man has to protect himself, short of
actual violence, against other men who covet his valuables or simply wish to demonstrate
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 25
dominance over him. Furthermore, in societies where the state lacks an effective
monopoly on the means of violence, there is endemic and deadly conflict between
coalitions (Pinker, 2012; Williams, 2011). Such conflicts heighten the functional value of
dominance-related traits such as musculature and valor. In other words, the status of
manhood should be more important and more emphasized in cultures that have limited
central authority structures than in those that have strong centralized governments.
Because of this, increasing centralization and modernization should lead to a general
decline of violence, aggression, and the prestige that is accorded to more traditional
notions of masculinity. Strong evidence supports the first two predictions; the third is
supported by anecdotal evidence and requires further examination.
In the Western World, for example, homicide rates have steadily declined (Eisner,
2003). In the United States, homicide rates dropped from roughly 35 per 100,000 in 1700
to 5.3 per 100,000 in 2010 (Fischer, 2011; Murphy, Xu, & Kochanek, 2013 table 15).
Similarly, violent deaths in war (as a percentage of the population) have dramatically
declined over time (Goldstein, 2012; Pinker, 2012). This decline corresponds to
increasing centralization, including the creation of a state-controlled police force.
Furthermore, this secular decrease in violence and aggression is cross-national (Pinker,
2012). In general, as a single state entity develops an effective monopoly over the use of
the means of violence, violence and aggression within the state decline, especially in
democracies that limit the political power of leaders. This freedom from the fear of
violence allows men to focus on activities and skills that are not directly related to
physical conflict such as science, literature, law, and art. It is tempting to speculate that
this freedom from violence and the ability to grant prestige to intellectually talented men
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 26
contributed to modernization. That is, as groups (societies) began to invest more
resources, including status, into the creation of knowledge, information, and technology,
society began to modernize because more and more talented individuals focused their
time and energies on such activities (Riddley, 2010).
Whatever the confluence of causes, the modernization and increased affluence of
Western societies altered the relative value of various traits (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005).
Self-control, intelligence, creativity, and agreeability became important functional traits
for long-term success in these societies, while impetuousness, aggression, and
vindictiveness became less functional--although they may retain functional importance in
various subcultures, as we will discuss (Brooks, 2000; Lindsey, 2013; Schmidt, &
Hunter, 2004; Tagney, Baumeister, & Boone, 2004). The panoply of intellectually or
artistically gifted but physically unimposing people who have obtained prestige since the
beginning of the twentieth century supports our argument that as society modernizes,
novel avenues to prestige open up. (Consider, for a partial list, Albert Einstein, Noam
Chomsky, Bertrand Russell, Bill Gates, Ralph Nader, Woody Allen, Humphrey Bogart,
Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Alfred Hitchcock). With this shift in
values, there was a shift in the manhood narrative (Kimmel, 2012). Primarily, manhood
itself became less restrictive and arguably less precarious because a proliferation of paths
to success reduced the importance of violence, aggression, and physical prowess
therefore decreasing the importance of traditional manhood displays, at least in certain
subcultures (Millet & Dewitte, 2007). Although associated with declining violence and
aggression, such a shift in values is not without complication. For example, Faludi (2000)
notes that the decline of blue collar jobs has created something of a masculine malaise as
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 27
many men struggle to come to terms with the decline of more traditional notions of
manhood that were focused on honor and toughness.
The secular decrease in the status of traditional signals of manhood thus results
from the declining functional value of the traits emphasized by traditional manhood
narratives. However, many and variegated subcultures have blossomed from the soil of
modernity. If the above analysis is correct, subcultures that require traditionally
masculine traits for success should value the status of traditional notions of manhood and
should emphasize traditional masculine behaviors, lauding physical prowess and courage
while demeaning weakness and timidity. In these cultures, manhood should be
particularly precarious and compensatory behaviors should include aggressive acts,
derogation of effeminate men, support for war, support for hierarchy, and other
traditionally masculine behaviors. Conversely, subcultures that downplay traditional
masculine behaviors--aggression, rigid hierarchy--while promoting intellect, empathy,
and creativity should devalue the status of manhood (or change its meaning). In such
subcultures, threats to manhood should produce little reactance; and, in extreme cases,
traditional notions of manhood may be denigrated. It is important to note, however, that
these cultural differences are at least partially caused by the personality traits of the
people who voluntarily join these different subcultures. Physically formidable,
aggressive, and dominant men are probably more attracted to cultures that promote
masculine virtues, whereas sensitive and creative men are probably more attracted to
cultures that devalue traditional masculine virtues and extol the virtues of creativity and
intellectual exploration (Feist, 1998). It is worth noting that these subcultures are not
without evaluations and challenges to status. For example, an academic might assail
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 28
another academic by calling him or her inane or unoriginal. This, we suspect, would have
a similar effect to calling a starting quarterback a coward or a pussy. However, the
academic’s compensatory behaviors would function to reassert his or her intellectual
competence rather than physical prowess.
Consider two examples: team sports and the arts. The culture that surrounds
aggressive team sports buttresses traditional masculine behaviors and attitudes (Messner,
1995), and appeals to many men (Deaner et al., 2012). Supporting this view of
aggressive team sports, Kreager (2007) found that adolescents who played contact sports
were more likely than those who either played non-contact sports or no sports to have
engaged in a serious physical fight. Forbes, Adams-Curtis, Pakalka, and White (2006)
found that, on average, men who participated in aggressive sports were more hostile
toward women, more likely to engage in physical aggression and sexual coercion toward
their romantic partners, more physically aggressive in general, more accepting of
violence, less accepting of homosexuality, and more tolerant of rape myths than men who
did not. Many of these sports (e.g., football and hockey), require physical strength, skill,
pain tolerance, aggression, and sacrifice. Philip Rivers, for example, withstood intense
pain and possible career-ending injury to lead his coalition. Therefore, players and
coaches laud the virtues of traditional manhood, of self-sacrifice and aggression, and
denigrate men who cannot endure the rigors of contact football. Often these slanders
include some variation on calling a poorly performing man a “woman,” a “little girl,” or a
“bitch.” (Even the mainstream media allows for jokes about how one’s daughter could
beat one player or another.) These insults, although often hurtful and anachronistic, are
not arbitrary. Women actually are physically weaker (measured by strength and
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 29
musculature), on average, than men (Sell, Hone, & Pound, 2012). Recall the many
vicious insults hurled at Jay Cutler. Many were sex-related challenges to Cutler’s
manhood and served the function of degrading his status.
The culture that surrounds many artistic activities such as acting, writing, or
painting, on the other hand, seems to devalue traditional notions of manhood. Many of
these arts emphasize empathy, creativity, and intellect (Feist, 1998; Jamison, 1989). They
do not require physical prowess, pain tolerance, or aggression. As such, our analysis
predicts that in such subcultures, traditional manhood norms are ignored, perhaps even
denigrated if these men are directly competing for prestige with men from more
traditional masculine cultures (e.g., if “nerds” are competing against “jocks” for status at
a high school; see Milner jr., 2006). Although we are not aware of any direct evidence,
anecdotal evidence supports this contention. Researchers have noted, for example, that
creative artists possess different personality traits from the average person in the
population; specifically, creative artists score higher on openness and neuroticism than
the average person (Feist, 1998; Gotz & Gotz, 1979; Simonton, 2000). They are also
more likely to suffer certain mental disorders than the average person (Andreasen, 2006;
Burch, Pavelis, Hemsley, & Corr, 2006; Jamison, 1989). These mental disorders
(schizotypy, manic depressive illness) would likely impede the ability to lead a coalition
consistently especially during between group hostilities (Strauss, 2013). Perhaps more
important, intellectuals and artists tend to denigrate the values associated with between
group conflict such as loyalty, obedience, patriotism, dominance, aggression, etc. (Fox &
Williams, 1974; Gross & Fosse, 2012; Johnson, 2007). Furthermore, many arts are
considered “feminine” and often attract derision from masculine men. Experience
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 30
suggests that many artists welcome such scorn and actively promote the virtues of “the
feminine.” [John Lennon noted, for example, that he “was torn between being Marlon
Brando and being the sensitive poet--the Oscar Wilde part of me with the velvet,
feminine side” (Katz, 2010).] However, future research is require to support or cast doubt
on these speculations. One straightforward suggestion of this analysis is that men who
identify with the creative arts will have little or no reaction to gender threats.
Womanhood: Precarious Sexuality?
According to precarious manhood researchers, manhood is different from
womanhood because manhood is not biologically conferred; instead, it must be earned.
Womanhood, on the other hand, is a product of biology (Bosson & Vandello, 2013).
Because women did not engage in coalitional competitions that required physical
strength, violence, pain tolerance so often as men did, they did not develop a narrative to
regulate each other’s physical prowess, aggression, and pain tolerance (except, maybe in
the reverse direction: that is, women discourage physical aggression) (Campbell, 2013).
Furthermore, a status-exchange system is less likely to operate in women than men
because women do not form large coalitions but instead form smaller networks that place
an emphasis on equality (Benensen, 2013). This difference leads to different genderrelated behaviors because men need to display signals of their masculinity to secure the
status of manhood while women’s femininity is a biological given, although women will
compete with each other over mates by, e.g., emphasizing their beauty and their
maternalism (Buss, 1989; Etcoff, 1999; Geary, 2010). Although we agree with this line of
thought, we believe that an important component of a woman’s social status might be
precarious: her sexuality2 (Lees, 1986).
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 31
According to an economic analysis of sexuality, sex is a resource and its value
depends, at least in part, on principles of supply and demand (Baumeister & Twenge,
2002; Hakim, 2010; Symons, 1979). If the supply of sex--that is, the availability of
sexually receptive females--increases, the value of sex decreases. Because of this, women
may suppress each other’s sexuality to maintain the value of their sexual behavior. From
an evolutionary perspective, women use sex to cajole resources and commitment from
men (Fisher, 1983). If some women are willing to offer sex without commitment, the
ability of other women to use sex as a bargaining chip is diminished. If this is correct,
women should be particularly hostile toward prostitution because prostitutes provide
cheap access to sexual fulfillment. Evidence suggests that women do indeed harbor more
hostile attitudes toward prostitution than men do (Cotton, Farley, & Baron, 2002;
Jakobsson & Kotsdam, 2011). Alternatively, men may curb and control women’s
sexuality to preserve chaste women for marriage and to protect the modesty of their
daughters and other female kin. This may lead to the propagation of a modesty narrative
that women internalize (Valenti, 2009). Whatever the underlying reasons, women often
strive to curb the sexuality of peers and rivals alike.
One way of accomplishing this goal is by besmirching the reputation of women
who violate expectations of sexual modesty and restraint (Buss & Dedden, 1990; Owens,
Shute, & Slee, 2000; Vaillancourt & Sharma, 2011). Men may also attempt to curb
women’s sexuality because of the cost of getting cuckolded, that is, the cost of raising
another man’s child because of the surreptitious infidelity of a romantic partner (Buss &
Schmitt, 1993; Graham-Kevan & Archer, 2009). This may lead to a precarious sexuality
for women, who, because of the importance of sexual modesty, are pressured to display
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 32
their sexual fastidiousness and fidelity (Inglehart & Norris, 2003; Kreager & Staff, 2009).
Like the status of manhood, the status of sexual modesty is socially conferred and easy to
lose. Vicious insults are often hurled at women who are perceived as failing to live up to
the status of sexual modesty, including “slut” and “whore” (Tanenbaum, 2000). Indeed,
women’s intrasexual competition may be as intense as men’s, although it is often more
difficult to quantify because it is rarely so obvious or overt as is men’s (see Fisher,
Garcia, & Sokol Chang, 2013)
If the above analysis is correct, threats to a woman’s sexual modesty should cause
anxiety and a series of compensatory cognitions and behaviors designed to alleviate the
anxiety and reaffirm sexual modesty. Compensatory cognitions and behaviors might
include challenging those who threaten one’s modesty, attacking other women’s sexual
modesty, emitting hard-to-fake signals of commitment to a romantic partner, and
engaging a group of women to prepare for “informational warfare” (Hess & Hagen,
2002). This hypothesis could be tested by challenging women’s modesty with bogus
feedback in a lab. One could then inquire about the women’s attitudes about sexuality,
sexually “immodest” women, and commitment. Other, more externally valid dependent
measures could be used. Perhaps, for example, one could have the women pick out
clothes for an upcoming hypothetical night out. We would predict that threatened women
would choose more modest clothing than non-threatened women to reassert their sexual
purity.
As with the status of manhood, the status of sexual modesty should also be
sensitive to cultural forces. If one accepts the Baumeister and Twenge (2002) contention
that women are the primary force behind the suppression of other women’s sexuality, one
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 33
would predict that the status of sexual modesty would be most precarious and most
valued in societies where women have few other resources to offer the social market.
According to Baumeister and Twenge, such societies deprive women of nonsexual ways
of engaging the market, forcing them to more highly value their sexuality than might
otherwise be the case. Conversely, it may be that men in patriarchal societies have more
power to suppress women’s sexuality than men in more gender equal societies. Whatever
the underlying reasons, research supports the proposal that traditional (i.e., patriarchal)
societies emphasize sexual modesty more than modernized societies with greater degrees
of gender equality (Buss, 1989; Inglehart & Norris, 2003; Schmitt, 2005; Zentner &
Mitura, 2012).
Conclusion
The status of manhood is precarious because it requires tremendous effort to
obtain and, once obtained, remains tenuous because it depends upon constant affirmation
by social observers. We have argued that this precariousness is the result of evolutionary
and cultural forces. Specifically, humans evolved from primates that participated in
dominance hierarchies and between-group agonistic encounters. Evidence suggests that
men evolved specific psychological propensities to cope with intra and intergroup
competition (Puts, 2010; Van Vugt, De Cremer, & Janssen, 2007). Dominance is still
important for men because it determines access to crucial resources. However, prestige is
also an important force for men and facilitates the formation of complicated hierarchies
(Halevy, Chou, & Galinsky, 2011). Men, therefore, often compete against each other by
displaying signals of commitment and social value. In groups that often engage in
physical (or economic) conflict with other groups, signals of physical prowess, skill, pain
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 34
tolerance, and aggressiveness will be valued and men who display them will win the
esteem of their peers. However, in groups that do not physically compete against other
groups, other traits, such as intelligence and agreeableness, might win the respect of
peers. The status of manhood and the requisite rituals that accompany it may appear
destructive or mean spirited, but they are not arbitrary. Last, we speculated that women’s
sexuality might be similarly precarious. Future research can determine whether this
speculation is true and what consequences it might have.
The framework presented in this article offers avenues for future research. The
first, and most direct, prediction of our account of precarious manhood is that men who
identify with subcultures that value traits such as creativity, intelligence, empathy, and
openness to experience more than traditionally masculine traits should have attenuated
responses to manhood challenges. (This is by no means a wholly original prediction; see,
Vandello & Cohen, 2008.) This could be tested by using nonrandom samples of
undergraduate students, some of whom identify with various “alternative” subcultures
(e.g., artists, “freaks,” and “goths”) and some of whom identify with more traditional
cultures (fraternity brothers, contact sports fans and players). A second and corollary
prediction of our account is that although the men who identify with subcultures that do
not emphasize traditional manhood narratives may be relatively impervious to manhood
related identity threats, they will not be immune to prestige threats. According to our
account, manhood is about dominance and prestige, and prestige is obtained and
protected by displaying valuable traits and convincing others that one’s own traits ought
to be valued. Men who identify with subcultures that value intelligence more than
physical prowess, for one example, may use terms such as “genius” or “original” or
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 35
“creative scholar,” to confer prestige. The men in such subcultures must compete to earn
those labels and should respond to threats to their social identity. This could be tested by
threatening such men’s intellectual or artistic identity. Perhaps, for example, researchers
could provide bogus feedback about such men’s performance on an intellectual puzzle
and then have them write an essay that they believe will be graded by several scholars.
Our prediction is that those men who were threatened would use a higher proportion of
polysyllabic and esoteric words than those men who were not.
Before concluding, we note that the preceding analysis suggests possible
palliatives for potentially destructive masculine pursuits and behaviors. As society
becomes more pluralistic, the pursuit of dominance and prestige becomes less monolithic.
Novel avenues for esteem open. Men in modern Western societies can pursue status
through art, science, acting, teaching, and playing chess, just to name a few. This trend
should be encouraged by funding diverse extra-curricular activities for adolescents
outside of traditional and restrictive domains such as sports and cheerleading (Bissinger,
1990; Eder & Kinney, 1995; Milner jr., 2006). Furthermore, outside social pressures can
influence traditionally masculine domains, shaming the more egregious and destructive
manhood-related behaviors and rituals. Such pressures have already blunted the most
extreme of such behaviors. For example, in the NFL, ex-players, coaches, and analysts
have pushed for measures to protect the safety of current and future players, and have
especially focused on reducing the insidious effects of chronic head injuries (FainuruWada & Fainaru, 2013). Others have pushed for the acceptance of gay men in sports,
leading to the first “coming out” of an NBA (National Basketball Association) player.
This player, Jason Collins, received support from many players, including Kobe Bryant,
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 36
who was earlier reprimanded for using an anti-gay slur and compelled to apologize
(Hoffman & Haughney, 2013). Many professional athletes participated in a campaign in
support of LGBT individuals, creating short commercials that concluded with the
message that “it gets better” (A trend that would have been unthinkable a mere 20 years
ago).
So long as men care about status, they will compete vigorously against other men
and will probably insult and denigrate their competitors. This is still quite common
(indeed, is so common it is hardly noted) in domains that eschew traditional notions of
manhood such as Academia. The goal should not be to eliminate this competitiveness and
its corollary of invidious insults and comparisons (because such a goal is infeasible), but
to soften the more destructive aspects of this side-effect of male-male competition while
encouraging the more creative and productive aspects. Male-male competition may have
killed, injured, and assaulted innumerable men (and women), but it has also led to the
creation of many culturally useful products, institutions, and artworks. Indeed, it may
even lead to an escalating battle of altruistic behaviors whereby men compete against
each other to display their benevolence and prosocial traits (Hardy & Van Vugt, 2006).
The great moralists of history might have been highly competitive men who discovered
an alternative path to status. The wider this path, the better.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 37
References
Adler, P. A., Kless, S. J., & Adler, P. (1992). Socialization to gender roles: Popularity
among elementary school boys and girls. Sociology of education, 169-187.
Alcock, J. (2013). Animal behavior: An evolutionary approach (10th ed.). Sundarland,
MA: Sinauer.
Alexander, R. D. (1990). How did humans evolve? Reflections on the uniquely unique
species. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
Anderson, C., & Kennedy, J. A. (2012). Micropolitics: A new model of status
hierarchies in teams. Research on Managing Groups and Teams, 15, 49-80.
Anderson, C., & Kilduff, G.J. (2009). The pursuit of status in social groups. Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 295-298.
Andersson, M. (1994). Sexual selection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Andreasen, N.C. (2006). The creative brain: The science of genius. New York: Plume.
Atran, S., & Norenzayan, A. (2004). Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition,
commitment, compassion, communion. Behavioral and brain sciences, 27, 713730.
Barber, N. (2000). The sex ratio as a predictor of cross-national variation in violent
crime. Cross-Cultural Research, 34, 264-282.
Barnes, C. D., Brown, R. P., & Tamborski, M. (2012). Living dangerously culture of
honor, risk-taking, and the nonrandomness of “accidental” deaths. Social Psychological
and Personality Science, 3, 100-107.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 38
Baumeister, R. F. (2005). The cultural animal: Human nature, meaning, and social life.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Baumeister, R. F. (2010). Is there anything good about men? New York: Oxford
University Press.
Baumeister, R. F., & Twenge, J. M. (2002). Cultural suppression of female sexuality.
Review of General Psychology, 6, 166-203.
Benenson, J. F. (2013). The development of human female competition: allies and
adversaries. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological
Sciences, 368, 20130079.
Benenson, J. F., Markovits, H., Fitzgerald, C., Geoffroy, D., Flemming, J., Kahlenberg,
S. M., & Wrangham, R. W. (2009). Males' greater tolerance of same-sex peers.
Psychological Science, 20, 184-190.
Betzig, L. (1986). Despotism and differential reproduction: A Darwinian view of history.
Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyte.
Betzig, L. (1993). Sex, succession, and stratification in the first six civilizations: How
powerful men reproduced, passed power on to their sons, and used power to
defend their wealth, women, and children. In L. Ellis (Ed.), Social stratification
and socioeconomic inequality
(Vol. 1, pp. 37–74). Westport, CT: Praeger.
Betzig, L. (2012). Means, variances, and ranges in reproductive success: comparative
evidence. Evolution and Human Behavior, 33, 309-317.
Bird, R. (1999). Cooperation and conflict: The behavioral ecology of the sexual division
of labor. Evolutionary Anthropology, 8, 65-75.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 39
Bissinger, H.G. (1990). Friday night lights: A town, a team, and a dream. Cambridge,
MA: De Capo Press.
Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Boehm, C. (2012). Ancestral hierarchy and conflict. Science, 336, 844-847.
Bosson, J. K., & Vandello, J. A. (2011). Precarious manhood and its links to action and
aggression. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20, 82-86.
Bosson, J. K., & Vandello, J. A. (2013). Manhood, womanhood, and the importance of
context: A reply to commentaries. Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 14, 125128.
Bosson, J. K., Vandello, J. A., Burnaford, R. M., Weaver, J. R., & Wasti, S. A. (2009).
Precarious manhood and displays of physical aggression. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, 35, 623-634.
Bowles, S. (2009). Did warfare among ancestral hunter-gatherers affect the evolution of
human social behaviors?. Science, 324, 1293-1298.
Brill, D. (2008). Goth culture: Gender, sexuality and style. New York: Bloomsbury.
Brooks, D. (2000). Bobos in paradise: The new upper class and how they got there. New
York: Touchstone.
Brown, D.E. (1991). Human universals. New York City: McGraw Hill.
Burch, G. S. J., Pavelis, C., Hemsley, D. R., & Corr, P. J. (2006). Schizotypy and
creativity in visual artists. British Journal of Psychology, 97, 177-190.
Buss, D. M. (1989). Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses
tested in 37 cultures. Behavioral and brain sciences, 12, 1-49.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 40
Buss, D. M. (2009). The great struggles of life: Darwin and the emergence of
evolutionary psychology. American Psychologist, 64, 140-148.
Buss, D. M., & Dedden, L. A. (1990). Derogation of competitors. Journal of Social and
Personal Relationships, 7, 395-422.
Buss, D. M., & Schmitt, D. P. (1993). Sexual strategies theory: an evolutionary
perspective on human mating. Psychological review, 100, 204-232.
Cafazzo, S., Valsecchi, P., Bonanni, R., & Natoli, E. (2010). Dominance in relation to
age, sex, and competitive contexts in a group of free-ranging domestic dogs.
Behavioral Ecology, 21, 443-455.
Campbell, A. (2013). The evolutionary psychology of women's aggression. Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences,368, 20130078.
Chapais, B. (2010). The deep structure of human society: Primate origins and evolution.
In P. M. Kappeler & J. B. Silk (Eds.), Mind the gap: Tracing the origins of human
universals (pp. 19–51). New York: Springer.
Cheng, J. T., Tracy, J. L., Foulsham, T., Kingstone, A., & Henrich, J. (2013). Two ways
to the top: Evidence that dominance and prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to
social rank and influence. Journal of personality and social psychology, 104, 103125.
Chomsky, N. (2000). New horizons in the study of language and mind. Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press.
Cimino, A. (2013). Predictors of hazing motivation in a representative sample of the
United States. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34, 446-452.
Clutton-Brock, T. (2009). Sexual selection in females. Animal Behaviour, 77, 3-11.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 41
Clutton-Brock, T. H., & Vincent, A. C. (1991). Sexual selection and the potential
reproductive rates of males and females. Nature, 351, 58-60.
Cohen, D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1994). Self-protection and the culture of honor: Explaining
southern violence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 551-567.
Coleman, J.S. (1961). The adolescent society: The social life of the teenager and its
impact on education. New York: Free Press.
Confer, J. C., Easton, J. A., Fleischman, D. S., Goetz, C. D., Lewis, D. M., Perilloux, C.,
& Buss, D. M. (2010). Evolutionary psychology: Controversies, questions,
prospects, and limitations. American Psychologist, 65, 110-126.
Costa, D. L., & Kahn, M. E. (2003). Cowards and heroes: Group loyalty in the American
Civil War. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118, 519-548.
Cotton, A., Farley, M., & Baron, R. (2002). Attitudes toward prostitution and acceptance
of rape myths. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 32, 1790–6
Cronk, L. (2005). The application of animal signaling theory to human phenomena: some
thoughts and clarifications. Social science information,44, 603-620.
Crouse, K. (2009, January 2). Two indomitable quarterbacks square off. New York Times
at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/03/sports/football/03chargers.html?_r=0
Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. London: John
Murray.
de Bruyn, E.H., Cillessen, A.H.N., & Weisfeld, G.E. (2012). Dominance-popularity
status, behavior, and the emergence of sexual activity in young adolescents.
Evolutionary Psychology, 10, 296-319.
de Waal F.B.M. 1982. Chimpanzee politics. London: Jonathan Cape.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 42
de Waal F.B.M., & Luttrell L.M. (1985). The formal hierarchy of rhesus macaques: an
investigation of the bared-teeth display. American Journal of Primatology, 9, 73–
85.
Dixson, B. J., & Vasey, P. L. (2012). Beards augment perceptions of men's age, social
status, and aggressiveness, but not attractiveness. Behavioral Ecology, 23, 481490.
Dubreuil, B. (2013). Human evolution and the origins of hierarchies: The state of nature.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Duffy, K. G., Wrangham, R. W., & Silk, J. B. (2007). Male chimpanzees exchange
political support for mating opportunities. Current Biology, 17, R586-R587.
Durkheim, E. (1997). The division of labor in society. New York: Free Press.
Eastwick, P. W. (2009). Beyond the pleistocene: using phylogeny and constraint to
inform the evolutionary psychology of human mating. Psychological bulletin,
135, 794-821.
Eder, D. (1995). School talk: Gender and adolescent culture. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
Eder, D., & Kinney, D. A. (1995). The effect of middle school extra curricular activities
on adolescents' popularity and peer status. Youth & Society, 26, 298-324.
Eisner, M. (2003). Long-term historical trends in violent crime. Crime and Justice, 30,
83-142.
Ellis, L. (1995). Dominance and reproductive success among nonhuman animals: a crossspecies comparison. Ethology and Sociobiology, 16(4), 257-333.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 43
Emlen, S. T., & Oring, L. W. (1977). Ecology, sexual selection, and the evolution of
mating systems. Science, 197, 215-223.
Emlen, D. J. (2008). The evolution of animal weapons. Annual Review of Ecology,
Evolution, and Systematics, 39, 387-413.
Etcoff, N. (1999). Survival of the prettiest: The science of beauty. New York, NY:
Anchor Books.
Fainuru-Wada, M., & Fainuru, S. (2013). League of denial: The NFL, concussions and
the battle for truth. New York: Crown Archetype.
Faludi, S. (2000). Stiffed: The betrayal of the American man. New York: Harper.
Feist, G. J. (1998). A meta-analysis of personality in scientific and artistic creativity.
Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2, 290-309.
Fischer, C. (2011, May 2). A crime puzzle. The Public Intellectual retrieved from
http://thepublicintellectual.org/2011/05/02/a-crime-puzzle/
Fisher, H. (1983). The sex contract: The evolution of human behavior. New York:
William & Morrow.
Fisher, M., Sokol Chang, R., & Garcia, J. (2013). Evolution’s empress: Darwinian
perspectives on the nature of women. New York: Oxford University Press.
Flannery, K., & Marcus, J. (2012). The creation of inequality: How our
prehistoric ancestors set the stage for monarchy, slavery, and empire. Boston,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Flinn, M. V., Geary, D. C., & Ward, C. V. (2005). Ecological dominance, social
competition, and coalitionary arms races: Why humans evolved extraordinary
intelligence. Evolution and Human Behavior, 26, 10-46.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 44
Forbes, G. B., Adams-Curtis, L. E., Pakalka, A. H., & White, K. B. (2006). Dating
aggression, sexual coercion, and aggression-supporting attitudes among college
men as a function of participation in aggressive high school sports. Violence
Against Women, 12, 441-455.
Fox, W. S., & Williams, J. D. (1974). Political orientation and music preferences among
college students. Public Opinion Quarterly, 38, 352-371.
Funk, L. C., & Werhun, C. D. (2011). “You’re Such a Girl!” The psychological drain of
the gender-role harassment of men. Sex roles, 65, 13-22.
Gat, A. (2000). The human motivational complex: Evolutionary theory and the causes of
hunter- gatherer fighting. Part I. Primary somatic and reproductive causes.
Anthropological Quarterly, 73, 20-34.
Geary, D. C. (2000). Evolution and proximate expression of human paternal
investment. Psychological bulletin, 126, 55-77.
Geary, D. C. (2005). The origin of mind: Evolution of brain, cognition, and general
intelligence. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Geary, D.C. (2010). Male/female: The evolution of human sex differences (2nd ed.).
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Geary, D.C., Winegard, B., Winegard, B. (2014). Reflections on the evolution of human
sex differences: Social selection and the evolution of competition among women.
In V.A. Weekes-Shackelford & T.K. Shackelford (Eds.), Evolutionary
perspectives on human sexual psychology and behavior (pp. 393-412). New York:
Springer.
Gilmore, D. D. (1990). Manhood in the making. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 45
Girman, D. J., Mills, M. G. L., Geffen, E., & Wayne, R. K. (1997). A molecular genetic
analysis of social structure, dispersal, and interpack relationships of the African
wild dog (Lycaon pictus). Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 40, 187-198.
Glick, P., Gangl, C., Gibb, S., Klumpner, S., & Weinberg, E. (2007). Defensive reactions
to masculinity threat: More negative affect toward effeminate (but not masculine)
gay men. Sex Roles, 57, 55-59.
Goldstein, J. (2012). Winning the war on war: The decline of armed conflict worldwide.
New York: Plume.
Goldsworthy, A. (2008). Caesar: The life of a colossus. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Gotz, K. O., & Gotz, K. (1979). Personality characteristics of professional artists.
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 49, 327-334.
Graham-Kevan, N., & Archer, J. (2009). Control tactics and partner violence in
heterosexual relationships. Evolution and Human Behavior, 30, 445-452.
Gross, N., & Fosse, E. (2012). Why are professors liberal? Theory and society, 41, 127168.
Hakim, C. (2010). Erotic capital. European sociological review, 26, 499-518.
Halevy, N., Chou, E. Y., & Galinsky, A. D. (2011). A functional model of hierarchy
Why, how, and when vertical differentiation enhances group performance.
Organizational Psychology Review, 1, 32-52.
Hanson, V.D. (2013). The savior generals: How five great commanders saved wars that
were lost---from Ancient Greece to Iraq. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 46
Harder, J. D., Stonerook, M. J., & Pondy, J. (1993). Gestation and placentation in two
New World opossums: Didelphis virginiana and Monodelphis domestica. Journal of
Experimental Zoology, 266, 463-479.
Hardy, C. L., & Van Vugt, M. (2006). Nice guys finish first: The competitive altruism
hypothesis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32, 1402-1413.
Heald, S. (2002). Manhood and Morality: sex, violence and ritual in Gisu society. New
York: Routledge.
Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred
deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission.
Evolution and human behavior, 22, 165-196.
Herdt, G. (Ed.). (1982). Rituals of manhood: male initiation in Papua New Guinea.
New Brunswik, NJ: Transaction Books.
Hess, N.C., & Hagen, E.H. (2002). Informational warfare. Unpublished manuscript.
Hill, K.R., Walker, R.S., Bozicevic, M., Eder, J., Headland, T., Hewlett, B., Hurtado,
A.M., Marlowe, F., Wiessner, P., & Wood. B. (2011). Co-residence patterns in
hunter-gatherer societies show unique human social structure. Science, 331,
1286-1289.
Hobbes, T. (1651/1982). Leviathan. New York: Penguin.
Hodkinson, P. (2002). Goth: Identity, style and subculture. New York: Bloomsbury.
Hoffman, B., & Haughney, C. (2013, April 29). Inside N.B.A and out, words of support
(mostly) for Collin’s revelation. New York Times retrieved from
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/sports/basketball/players-voicesupport-of-jason-collins-on-twitter.html?_r=0
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 47
Holland, B. (2004). Gentleman’s blood: A history of dueling. New York: Bloomsbury.
Inglehart, R., & Norris, P. (2003). The true clash of civilizations. Foreign policy, 63-70.
Inglehart, R., & Welzel, C. (2005) Modernization, cultural change and democracy: The
human development sequence. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Jakobsson, N., & Kotsadam, A. (2011). Gender equity and prostitution: An investigation
of attitudes in Norway and Sweden. Feminist Economics, 17, 31-58.
Jamison, K. R. (1989). Mood disorders and patterns of creativity in British writers and
artists. Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes, 52, 125-134.
Johnson, D. D. (2005). God’s punishment and public goods. Human Nature, 16, 410-446.
Johnson, P. (2007). Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky. New
York: Harper Perennial.
Kalish, R., & Kimmel, M. (2010). Suicide by mass murder: Masculinity, aggrieved
entitlement, and rampage school shootings. Health Sociology Review,19, 451-464.
Katz, J. (2010, December, 23). John Lennon on fatherhood, feminism, and phony tough
guy posturing. Huffington Post retreived from
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jackson-
katz/john-lennon-on-
fatherhood_b_800333.html
Keegan, J. (1994). A history of warfare. New York: Random House.
Kenrick, D. T., & Gutierres, S. E. (1980). Contrast effects and judgments of physical
attractiveness: When beauty becomes a social problem. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 38, 131.
Kiltie, R. A. (1982). Intraspecific variation in the mammalian gestation period. Journal of
Mammalogy, 63, 646-652.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 48
Kimmel, M. (1987). The contemporary “crisis” of masculinity in historical perspective.
In H. Bond (ed.), The making of masculinities (pp. 121-153). Boston: Allen &
Unwin. Kimmel, M. (2012). Manhood in America: A cultural history (3rd ed.).
New York: Oxford University Press.
Klein, J. (2012). The bully society: School shootings and the crisis of bullying in
America’s schools. New York: New York University Press.
Kokko, H., & Jennions, M. (2003). It takes two to tango. Trends in Ecology & Evolution,
18, 103-104.
Kolbert, J. B., & Crothers, L. M. (2003). Bullying and evolutionary psychology: The
dominance hierarchy among students and implications for school personnel.
Journal of School Violence, 2, 73-91.
Krasnow, M. M., Cosmides, L., Pedersen, E. J., & Tooby, J. (2012). What are
punishment and reputation for?. PloS one, 7, e45662.
Kreager, D. A. (2007). Unnecessary roughness? School sports, peer networks, and male
adolescent violence. American sociological review, 72, 705-724.
Kreager, D. A., & Staff, J. (2009). The sexual double standard and adolescent peer
acceptance. Social Psychology Quarterly, 72, 143-164.
LeBlanc, S. and Register, K.E. (2003). Constant battles: The myth of the peaceful, noble
savage. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Lees, S. (1986). Losing out: Sexuality and adolescent girls. London: Hutchinson.
Lehman, D. R., Chiu, C. Y., & Schaller, M. (2004). Psychology and culture. Annual
Review of Psychology, 55, 689-714.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 49
Leven, J. (2011, January 24). The day the entire NFL called Jay Cutler a coward. Slate
at http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/features/2011/nfl_playoffs_the_
super_bowl/the_day_the_entire_nfl_called_jay_cutler_a_coward.html
Li, N. P., Smith, A. R., Griskevicius, V., Cason, M. J., & Bryan, A. (2010). Intrasexual
competition and eating restriction in heterosexual and homosexual individuals.
Evolution and Human Behavior, 31, 365-372.
Liddle, J. R., Shackelford, T. K., & Weekes–Shackelford, V. A. (2012). Why can't we all
just get along? Evolutionary perspectives on violence, homicide, and war. Review
of General Psychology, 16, 24-36.
Lindsey, B. (2013). Human capitalism: How economic growth has made us smarter—and
more unequal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lorenz, K. (1966). On aggression. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Maynard Smith, J., & Harper, D. (2003). Animal signals. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Mazur, A. (2005). The biosociology of dominance and deference. Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield.
Meese, G. B., & Ewbank, R. (1973). The establishment and nature of the dominance
hierarchy in the domesticated pig. Animal Behaviour, 21, 326-334.
Messner, M. (1990). Boyhood, organized sports, and the construction of masculinities.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 18, 416-444.
Messner, M.A. (1995). Power at play: Sports and the problem of masculinity. Boston,
MA: Beacon Press.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 50
Millet, K., & Dewitte, S. (2007). Altruistic behavior as a costly signal of general
intelligence. Journal of Research in Personality, 41, 316-326.
Milner, M. Jr. (2006). Freaks, geeks, and cool kids. New York: Routledge.
Mueller, U., & Mazur, A. (1996). Facial dominance of West Point cadets as a predictor of
later military rank. Social forces, 74, 823-850.
Muller, M. N., & Mitani, J. C. (2005). Conflict and cooperation in wild chimpanzees.
Advances in the Study of Behavior, 35, 275-331.
Muller, U., & Mazur, A. (1997). Facial dominance in Homo sapiens as honest signaling
of male quality. Behavioral Ecology, 8, 569-579.
Murphy, S.L., Xu, J., & Kochanek, K.D. (2013). Deaths: Final data for 2010. National
Vitals and Statistics Reports, 61, 1-118.
Norenzayan, A., & Shariff, A. F. (2008). The origin and evolution of religious
prosociality. Science, 322, 58-62.
Nye, R. A. (2007). Western masculinities in war and peace. The American Historical
Review, 112, 417-438.
Oppenheimer, S. (2012). Out-of-Africa, the peopling of continents and islands: tracing
uniparental gene trees across the map. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society B: Biological Sciences, 367, 770-784.
Owens, L., Shute, R., & Slee, P. (2000). “Guess what I just heard!”: Indirect aggression
among teenage girls in Australia. Aggressive behavior, 26, 67-83.
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: How the mind creates language. New York:
William Morrow.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 51
Pinker, S. (2010). The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and
language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107, 8993-8999.
Pinker, S. (2012). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. New York:
Penguin Books.
Pleck, J. (1983). The myth of masculinity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pollet, T. V., & Nettle, D. (2008). Driving a hard bargain: sex ratio and male marriage
success in a historical US population. Biology Letters, 4, 31-33.
Pound, N., Penton-Voak, I. S., & Surridge, A. K. (2009). Testosterone responses to
competition in men are related to facial masculinity. Proceedings of the Royal
Society B: Biological Sciences, 276, 153-159.
Penn, D. C., Holyoak, K. J., & Povinelli, D. J. (2008). Darwin's mistake: Explaining the
discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. Behavioral and Brain
Sciences, 31, 109-129.
Puts, D. A. (2010). Beauty and the beast: mechanisms of sexual selection in humans.
Evolution and Human Behavior, 31, 157-175.
Puts, D. A., Hodges, C. R., Cárdenas, R. A., & Gaulin, S. J. (2007). Men's voices as
dominance signals: vocal fundamental and formant frequencies influence
dominance attributions among men. Evolution and Human Behavior, 28, 340-344.
Queller, D. C. (1997). Why do females care more than males?. Proceedings of the Royal
Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 264, 1555-1557.
Reby, D., & McComb, K. (2003). Anatomical constraints generate honesty: acoustic cues
to age and weight in the roars of red deer stags. Animal behaviour, 65, 519-530.
Ridley, M. (2010). The rational optimist: How prosperity evolves. New York: Harper.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 52
Rowell, T. E. (1966). Hierarchy in the organization of a captive baboon group. Animal
Behaviour, 14, 430-443.
Rowell, T. E. (1974). The concept of social dominance. Behavioral biology, 11, 131-154.
Salvador, A. (2005). Coping with competitive situations in humans. Neuroscience &
Biobehavioral Reviews, 29, 195-205.
Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). Social status and health in humans and other animals. Annual
Review of Anthropology, 393-418.
Schenkel, R. (1967). Submission: its features and function in the wolf and dog. American
Zoologist, 7, 319-329.
Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. (2004). General mental ability in the world of work:
occupational attainment and job performance. Journal of personality and social
psychology, 86, 162-173.
Schmitt, D. P. (2005). Sociosexuality from Argentina to Zimbabwe: A 48-nation study of
sex, culture, and strategies of human mating. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28,
247-274.
Schmitt, D. P., Shackelford, T. K., & Buss, D. M. (2001). Are men really more 'oriented'
toward short-term mating than women? A critical review of theory and research.
Psychology, Evolution & Gender, 3, 211-239.
Searcy, W. A., & Nowicki, S. (2010). The Evolution of animal communication:
Reliability and Deception in signaling systems. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 53
Sell, A., Bryant, G.A., Cosmideds, L., Tooby, J., Sznycer, D., Von Reuden, C., Krauss,
A., & Gurven, M. (2010). Adaptations in humans for assessing physical strength from the
voice. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 277, 3509-3518.
Sell, A., Cosmides, L., Tooby, J., Sznycer, D., von Rueden, C., & Gurven, M. (2009).
Human adaptations for the visual assessment of strength and fighting ability from
the body and face. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 276,
575-584.
Sell, A., Hone, L. S., & Pound, N. (2012). The importance of physical strength to human
males. Human Nature, 23, 30-44.
Shackelford, T. K. (2005). An evolutionary psychological perspective on cultures of
honor. Evolutionary psychology, 3, 381-391.
Simonton, D. K. (2000). Creativity: Cognitive, personal, developmental, and social
aspects. American psychologist, 55, 151-158.
Smith, J. M., & Price, G. R. (1973). The Logic of Animal Conflict. Nature, 246, 15-18.
Sosis, R., & Alcorta, C. (2003). Signaling, solidarity, and the sacred: The evolution of
religious
Strauss, B. (2013). Masters of command: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, and the genius of
leadership. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Tanenbaum, L. (2000). Slut! Growing up female with a bad reputation. New York:
Harper.
Tangney, J. P., Baumeister, R. F., & Boone, A. L. (2004). High self‐ control predicts
good adjustment, less pathology, better grades, and interpersonal success. Journal
of Personality, 72, 271-324.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 54
Tobias, J. A., Montgomerie, R., & Lyon, B. E. (2012). The evolution of female
ornaments and weaponry: social selection, sexual selection and ecological
competition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological
Sciences, 367, 2274-2293.
Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly review of biology,
35-57.
Trivers, R. L. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.),
Sexual selection and the descent of man 1871-1971 (pp. 136-179). Chicago:
Aldine.
Vaillancourt, T., & Sharma, A. (2011). Intolerance of sexy peers: intrasexual competition
among women. Aggressive behavior, 37, 569-577.
Valenti, J. (2009). The purity myth: How America’s obsession with virginity is hurting
young women. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press.
Van Vugt, M., De Cremer, D., & Janssen, D. P. (2007). Gender Differences in
Cooperation and Competition The Male-Warrior Hypothesis. Psychological
Science, 18, 19-23.
Vandello, J. A., & Cohen, D. (2008). Culture, gender, and men's intimate partner
violence. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2, 652-667.
Vandello, J. A., & Bosson, J. K. (2012). Hard Won and Easily Lost: A Review and
Synthesis of Theory and Research on Precarious Manhood. Psychology of Men &
Masculinity, 14, 101-113.
Vigil, J. D. (1996). Street baptism: Chicano gang initiation. Human Organization, 55,
149-153.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 55
Weaver, J. R., Vandello, J. A., & Bosson, J. K. (2013). Intrepid, imprudent, or
impetuous? The effects of gender threats on men's financial decisions. Psychology
of Men & Masculinity, 14, 184-191.
Willer, R., Rogalin, C. L., Conlon, B., & Wojnowicz, M. T. (2013). Overdoing Gender:
A Test of the Masculine Overcompensation Thesis1. American journal of
sociology, 118, 980-1022.
Williams, P.D. (2011). War and conflict in Africa. Boston: Polity.
Winegard, B. (2011). Searching for the grand narrative: David Sloan Wilson’s passionate
plea for an evolution-based unification of disciplines. EvoS Journal: The Journal
of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium, 3, 20-25.
Wrangham, R. W. (1999). Evolution of coalitionary killing. American journal of
physical anthropology, 110, 1-30.
Wroblewski, E. E., Murray, C. M., Keele, B. F., Schumacher-Stankey, J. C., Hahn, B. H.,
& Pusey, A. E. (2009). Male dominance rank and reproductive success in
chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii.. Animal behaviour, 77, 873-885.
Wyatt-Brown, B. (2007). South honor: Ethics and behavior in the Old South. (2nd ed.).
New York: Oxford University Press.
Zentner, M., & Mitura, K. (2012). Stepping Out of the Caveman’s Shadow Nations’
Gender Gap Predicts Degree of Sex Differentiation in Mate Preferences.
Psychological science, 23, 1176-1185.
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 56
Table 1.
Category, Function, and Flexibility of Men’s Manhood-Related Displays and Signals
Status process
Dominance
Prestige
Function of display/Signal
Advertise quality of traits
related to fighting/physical
abilities
Advertise quality of traits
that can benefit others
and/or enhance coalition
Flexibility
Relatively inflexible,
although suppression is
possible
Relatively flexible, depends
on cultural factors
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 57
Footnotes
1
The preferences of women might also have a catalyzing effect on this process. For
example, researchers have found that when the operational sex ratio favors women (i.e.,
when there are relatively more available men in the mating pool), violence tends to
decline (Barber, 2000). This might accelerate the process of declining violence because a
decrease in violence means that 1) more men are available in the mating pool (i.e., fewer
men die from violent conflict) and that 2) this creates a operational sex ratio that favors
women thus further creating a pressure to reduce violence. Furthermore, other researchers
(Pollett and Nettle, 2008) have found that as the operational sex ratio shifts to favor
women, women are able to attract/demand higher status men (socioeconomic status).
This might create a pressure for men to compete for prestige to secure a desirable longterm mate.
2
We do not mean to suggest that women are uncompetitive about attractiveness, et cetera.
In fact, research indicates that women are quite competitive about their attractiveness,
possibly leading to a slew of insalubrious behaviors and psychological ailments
(Ferguson, Winegard, & Winegard, 2011; Li, Smith, Griskevicius, Cason, & Bryan,
2010). However, because physical appearance is more perspicuous than one’s sexual
proclivities, it is probably less vulnerable to the snipes and assaults of competitors. It
would probably be difficult, for example, to convince people that Marilyn Monroe was
unsightly. Upon the other hand, one’s sexual habits or behaviors are not immediately
observable; therefore, a woman’s sexual reputation is vulnerable to the gossip and
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 58
insinuation. Simply denying a rumor doesn’t necessarily quash it (Hess & Hagen, 2002).
Of course, this does not mean that women (or men, for that matter) are impervious to
assaults on their physical appearance. And, it does not mean that slandering a person’s
appearance has no social effect; indeed, evidence suggests that it can affect the way
others perceive a person (Kenrick & Gutierres, 1980).
Running Head: EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD 59
Figure 1. Many faces of prestige
Photographs from Wikimedia commons
Figure 1. Caption. Plurality of prestige routes: Napoleon Bonaparte and Albert Einstein
possessed different skills and traits, but both achieved enormous prestige because their
traits enhanced the lives of individuals in their coalitions. Bonaparte, because of his
military genius, burnished the reputation of France; Einstein, because of his intelligence
and creativity, enhanced the reputation of physics and brought public attention to the
physicists of his generation.